Parfit's view of personal identity | Jeff McMahan 

Was lead to Brain in a Vat after taking a look at Daily Nous' list of recommended philosophy podcasts last year. It has become my favourite philosophical podcast. I've used the time and space generated by the pandemic to go on more walks, and nowadays my walks are accompanied by this podcast playing through my headphones. Keep up the good work guys, can't wait for more content.

Thanks you all for getting right to the point!

We should think of ourselves as informational constructs, and the information can be taken out of the brain. The brain cannot be essential.

Enjoyed this episode, and Jimmy I appreciated the Rhodes/Sewanee shout out at the end there! (I'm a Sewanee grad myself.)

Please go deeper into this. The profoundest mystery of personal identity isn’t persistence over time, but why I am me now as opposed to someone exactly like me who might have existed in my place. There has to be some ultimate reality deciding this, not part of this world, which means our personal identity isn't a feature of this world either. You should put Geoffrey Klempner on the show and interview him on this. He wrote a book about it called "The Idiotic Conundrum" and it’s all he thinks about. He’s a little outside of academia, but is a professional philosopher and worth hearing out even if almost no one else yet considers this a valid question.

Can I propose a radical solution to the problem: When you have no way to prove that the entity you experience IS NOT the person it pretends to be, than for you IT IS that person. May it be the real person, a clone, a replica, desintegrated and reintegrated, a hologram, an illusion, a dream, a drug induced halluzination. It just does not matter. Other observers may of course have different opinions, but you can not know what they know.

Some unfortunate discontinuities in the video (ironic, given the topic?). For instance, at 33:43 Mark's description of _Memento_ is cut short, and Jeff starts talking about something else. I re-watched that segment, and the same problem recurred each time. Watching on a Dell laptop. Excellent hosts and guest, in any case.

I have a right to the suffering I choose; and I have a right to the happiness I choose.

the actor was Guy Pearce not Guy Ritchie (who is a director)!

What happened to the video feed. Without the video feed it's like I'm listening to AIs.